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Free safety D.J. Swearinger’s boldness an important part of South Carolina’s success

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TAMPA, Fla. — This didn’t look like her son. As Orma Swearinger stood on the sideline in the gym, she noticed something she rarely saw before or since from D.J. She noticed fear.

D.J. was about 8 years old, and his basketball team, coached by Orma, was playing a talented opponent that ran over D.J.’s squad.

Orma prided herself on being tough on her players, especially her son, who she had groomed from birth to embrace an assertive demeanor. So on the car ride home, she told him, “You were playing scared.” She kept telling him that. He kept denying it, saying he wasn’t scared of anybody. But he vividly remembered her words.

“I think it was an insult to me, telling me that I was scared,” he said. “That was just something that drove me in sports for the rest of my life, not to play scared at all.”

“I’m gonna catch one of y’all.” In the fourth quarter he hammered tailback Andre Ellington in a clean but vicious collision. He leaned over Ellington, shouted an explicit word that equated Ellington to a woman and flexed his arms downward.